Welcome to Texas justice: You might beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Bounty from the blogosphere

A morning tour around the blogosphere yielded several interesting finds:

Improve the Death Penalty? Doc Berman asks: Assuming it won't be abolished, how can the death penalty be improved? Go offer your thoughts, if you have any on the subject. In a similar vein, CrimProf Blog points to an item from the Texas Lawyer declaring Texas' death sentences have dropped 65% in the last years. Any guesses as to why, or given the small numbers is that a statistical blip?

Who is receiving these messages? Berman also poses the question (in response to a Kentucky court ruling), "What's wrong with asking a jury to send a message?," and Eugene Volokh added his thoughts. I agreed with this comment on Berman's blog from Corey Yung: "the chief problem raised by "sending a message"-type arguments by a prosecutor is that those arguments can remove individualization from the sentencing process. Rather than saying the offender should be sentenced for the particulars of his or her crime, the prosecutor is making the defendant accountable for a larger population of potential criminals." Texas prosecutors, btw, do that ALL the time.

Snitches Lie, People Die. Radley Balko over at The Agitator is covering another egregious snitching story: This time officers in Atlanta convinced an informant to falsely declare he'd bought drugs from the home of an 88-year old woman, who was killed in the SWAT raid on her residence. Now the informant says police told him to lie. (Kudos to Balko, btw, on tracking this so closely.)

Sick in Jail. Via the Corrections Community blog I found this new Bureau of Justice Statistics report on medical problems of jail inmates. One in three jail inmates reports a current medical problem. Even more striking: one in eight reported having been injured since entering the jail. About half of women in jail have medical problems, says the report, compared to about a third of men.

We're #1! ... Oh Crap, That's Bad. Also from the Corrections Community blog, see this fact sheet from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency analyzing global incarceration rates. Bottom line: "The US has less than 5% of the world's population but over 23% of the world's incarcerated people." The land of the free, baby ... those statistics are just ridiculous. And as I've mentioned in the past, Texas' incarceration stats are so egregious they actually skew the rest of the nation's.

"I always tell people interested in these issues that your blog is the most important news source, and have had high-ranking corrections officials tell me they read it regularly."

- Scott Medlock, Texas Civil Rights Project

"a helluva blog"

- Solomon Moore, NY Times criminal justice correspondent

"Congrats on building one of the most read and important blogs on a specific policy area that I've ever seen"

- Donald Lee, Texas Conference of Urban Counties

GFB "is a fact-packed, trustworthy reporter of the weirdness that makes up corrections and criminal law in the Lone Star State" and has "shown more naked emperors than Hans Christian Andersen ever did."

-Attorney Bob Mabry, Woodlands

"Grits really shows the potential of a single-state focused criminal law blog"

- Corey Yung, Sex Crimes Blog

"I regard Grits for Breakfast as one of the most welcome and helpful vehicles we elected officials have for understanding the problems and their solutions."

Tommy Adkisson,Bexar County Commissioner

"dude really has a pragmatic approach to crime fighting, almost like he’s some kind of statistics superhero"